I love nature. As an anthropologist, I study what makes us human. Now I'm writing a blog about the relationship between humans and nature. I hope you enjoy it!

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Peace, Love, and Dinner

My husband and I are out walking. Mourning doves fly up into
the air, startled. I exclaim with delight at their beauty and soft alarm calls.
He lifts a pretend shotgun and starts shooting them. I envision them canoodling
in love and peace, the perfect example of monogamous bird love. He imagines them
stewing in a sauce of garlic and herbs.

Doves symbolize peace, love, dinner, and lots of other
things, depending on the person or the society. Doves figure heavily in
religious symbolism around the world. Goddesses in ancient societies, such as
Aphrodite, were symbolized by the dove. The dove gained an important meaning in
Judaic lore when Noah released a dove to guide the ark to land after the flood.
Christianity applied the dove as symbol to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit,
among other things. Perhaps because of its status in religion, the dove became
a symbol of peace in European culture. It is symbolic of fidelity and fecundity
in Chinese arts and holds spiritual meanings in Indian culture. And expressions
such as “lovey-dovey” in English show that somewhere along the way doves became
symbols of romantic love as well. How can doves mean so many different things
to different people and cultures? Are there any aspects of the actual lives of
doves that may have leant themselves to these meanings?

Perhaps it is their look. Most doves around the world are
smooth and round, with muted colors: a wonderful gray-brown with shades of rose,
or pure white, or light pink or orange. Maybe these colors make them seem
peaceful and mild. However, tufted titmice, juncos, and house finches come in
varying shades of gray and pinky-grey and white, yet I have never heard them
mentioned as symbols of peace.

Perhaps it is their soft cooing, which seems gentle or even
mournful. But a similar low hooting on the part of the great horned owl is cast
as creepy or ominous or even wise, not sweet or gentle or mournful.

Perhaps it is the close companionship of mated pairs. Males
and females are always together, and they mate in much of the world for the
entire year (rather than in a limited breeding season, like most birds). Maybe
we simply see them displaying mating behavior more often than other birds,
which makes them seem more loving. Their young accompany them for a while after
fledging, meaning that they are often in small groups. But of how many birds
can we say the same?

Even their “prey” meaning to hunters doesn’t make a great
deal of sense. They’re larger than many birds, but not as large as many others,
so they don’t provide a significant amount of meat. They can fly fast, which I
suppose makes them an interesting challenge for hunters, but can’t many other
birds fly fast as well? In fact, one of the concerns of those opposed to dove
hunting is that hunters may in fact be shooting other birds with much the same
general size and shape, which suggests doves aren’t terribly unique as sport.

In thinking about all of this, I would like to suggest a
simple explanation: it is their ubiquity, both in time and in space, that makes
doves so meaningful. Doves are one of the oldest bird species, older than the
songbirds. They are a family of birds (Columbidae) that is spread over almost every
part of the world, thrives in just about every type of ecosystem, and includes
over 300 species. In other words, there are lots of them around, and there
always have been. Human societies have had plenty of time and opportunity to
attach meanings to doves. And since doves are familiar to humans all over the
globe (unlike most bird families), it makes sense that some of those meanings
would come to be shared. Perhaps one religious group had the idea to represent
a deity through the symbol of a dove, and that same representation spread to another
through syncretism. Migration and shared cuisines could have brought the idea
that doves are good to eat from one continent to another.

At the end of the day, doves are birds, doing bird things:
breeding, searching for food, calling to each other, flying through the air.
That they are the carriers of symbolic meaning says much more about us humans
than it does about them.